


glassware may be hot to the touch

by transversely



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:20:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28311504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transversely/pseuds/transversely
Summary: There was a mark on the shoulder of her robe where someone had bitten the epaulet clean off; it explained to distasteful precision the sequins he’d extracted from his teeth in the last hours.
Relationships: Augustine the First/Mercymorn the First (Locked Tomb Trilogy)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 48
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	glassware may be hot to the touch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arbitrarily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/gifts).



> dear arbitrarily: everything in your letter hit my buttons for these two so hard that I had to get straight to the keyboard and hit more buttons until this got out. thank you for such a lovely encapsulation of this excellent, wretched horrorshow, and I hope you have a wonderful Yuletide!

The last time they were in the same room he’d wondered about how it would have been if he’d asked her thirty years ago, or three hundred years. If there had been a moment which would have been too soon or if by bringing it up--by discussing it at all--they’d alchemized the right time into being themselves. As if, like lovers, they’d only needed the other to say it.

“You unbearable fuckheaded--you apostate,” she’d said, and when she caught her breath, “this way was too hard for extraction, try coming on my tits again.”

He was in his chambers, turning pages and then turning them back. He replayed, at intervals, a nine-second mental reel of unspeakable sounds.

Into the second hour of doing that he realized he could turn more pages by getting extremely drunk, and into the second hour of doing _that_ , he found her in the cellar. She had a nice goblet of port in front of her but was doing something horrible to it with a hank of her hair, a chicken drumstick, and a fountain pen he he recognized as a half-century tribute to her from the Eighth House: an inkwell containing a drop of blood each from the seventeen hundred templars in training at the White Glass. There was no thanergy emanating from it anymore; the donors long and uneventfully dead. The pen so comically bloody, her table hygiene so comically unperturbed by the blood. She looked up and saw him.

“You can’t have any of this.” She pinioned out her fingers in a way that could have encompassed the port, the hair, the pen, or the drumstick.

He’d wanted the last, but the way she handled it made him revise his earlier opinion that it was chicken. He slung himself into a seat two chairs down from her and pulled the port towards him.

“Don’t drink that.”

"I'm parched after the night we've had. Isn't that what--John fell asleep after, quite amusing, and not unsweaty--so can't I be the one to say that?"

He put it to his lips and sucked on the rim before he’d decided whether to drink it or not. The copper was fine enough that he tasted money in his mouth instantly, the oxidized shine of old coins. Mercy was looking at him with the whites showing around the rims of her eyes. Wide and wild and clear as stencils. The bitter taste seemed related to her, to that gaze, although it must be definitively said now that he knew she tasted different--semisweet. A veritable chocolate chip of a coconspirating--

“I said,” she said.

“I don’t give a single sanctified sliver of shit, my dear.”

He was pleased to find that his voice managed all of this at a perfect, plate-carrying equilibrium. Managed screamingly well, even though he’d done what she wanted and against his better judgment and extreme animal needs, not touched the port at all. “Unless it has--unless you extracted into this very goblet, for some reason.”

She set the pen down hard. The little inkwell of blood wobbled. They both eyed it for a long time, as if an open wound or sandwich, until it stopped trembling. “The--sample--needed to be extracted into a biocontainer. Why would I kill--why would I _waste_ the entire effort by putting it into--”

“Well, then, is it in a biocontainer?”

“Augustine, do you think I would be so stupid as to avoid extracting it right away?”

He would take any opportunity this night, however small, to be truthful. “Not stupid, no.”

The second he said it he realized he’d needed that--some moment to say something he meant--like a cool palm to a fever; his grip on the stem loosened, he thought that if he let go the bones of his hands, his wrist, his forearm would loosen with it, leave the beating blood and tissue to cool on the floor. What a mess. It was fine that they'd done this, only, had the mess been necessary?

He concentrated very carefully on the four points of flesh, in his fingertips, which connected him to something he recalled wanting very badly, a few moments ago. He had wanted it, he thought, distantly and with care. He had.

She'd stood up. “I cannot believe you are selfish enough to _ask_ me that, sitting there so-- _shiny_ \--" she batted angrily at the front of her robes. "It was the first thing I thought of, I didn’t even wash the stench of you off my...” And suddenly he noticed that she was right: she was wearing the robe half open still, with her skin gleaming underneath it like a deep cut. There was a dreadful bite on the shoulder where someone had bitten the epaulet clean off; it explained to distasteful precision the sequins he’d extracted from his teeth in the last hours. She must have come directly from the chamber.

He didn't know. He had taken his leave and then gone back to his, as blank as water, as chilled; he'd scraped his skin wet and then dry with his face to the stars at his windows, so that he was a stranger to how his own marked body had looked. It hadn't felt like cleaning but rearrangement: an attempt to gather back the parts of himself now strewn in bio-shrapnel through John's chamber and her chamber and the great banquet table, to quieten the blood seething and stilling in his wrists, the pulse of his throat--how he _hated_ anatomy, her pedantic paint-by-numbers butchery!--how he _hated_ having a body that could be used, that could use!--and when all that stupid, banal tumult of stupid, banal organic matter was quietened he'd been quietened as well, and quietened the chamber, and quietened the stars, and then, only then, he'd opened his book, and sieved forth his pleasant evening.

"You're right," he said, still quiet. "You're quite filthy."

"Shut up, Augustine."

"Clean yourself up."

As he watched a great shudder scintillated up from her knees to her chest. He thought she might be sick but she only lurched forward hard, bracing the meat of her palm against her chair, breathing through her mouth as though she were alone. He wished she were alone.

There was a bright, christmasy tinkle: the pen had shattered on the floor. They watched the blood puddle forth. 

"Shut _up_ ," she repeated, all in her mouth. She'd filled her hand with her robe; her other hand held out from her body at right angles. The robe was an argentine swatch of satin so fine it squelched, like fruit, when she bunched it into her palm. The palm--it was just orange. Even after tonight.

He pushed back his chair, one leg dragging, scraping a fan in the blood. 

"Come on, then, Joy," he said, "if you won't, I'll need to clean you up." 

Contrary to both rumor and outright myth they waited too long to dispel, Augustine wasn't actually the one who had brought Mercymorn to the Mithraeum; it had been Alfred, who had gone to the founding of the Eighth and remembered how everyone had taken great pains to be very nice to a girl with a face like a lemon on the end of a steel stick, and not nearly as nice to the more clearly deserving cupcake of a cavalier next to her, carrying pastries in a net and smelling a flower--actually smelling it, with bucolic rapture. They'd slapped on some cologne, made an appearance, and reconnoitered. When she'd come back to the Mithraeum and set up all her models of meaty, spleeny things in the East Wing, Augustine ignored her and brought Crista flowers, and when twenty years later, a newborn Lyctor, she destroyed all the meaty, spleeny things in a storm of unabating, awful-smelling grief, he ignored her and brought the East Wing flowers as an act of abstract redecoration.

Alfred had genuinely liked her, had noticed her Eighth House syncophants' buttock-clenching deference to her precisely because he came by his impulse to defer to her naturally. Augustine had thought she was very orange, very brilliant, and very sad, as his dominant and alternating bands of regard, over the first four or five hundred years. 

For those first centuries, however, he didn't see her at all. The Fifth was quiet, pleasant, well-ordered, and civilized, as the grave of his brother was quiet, pleasant, well-ordered, and civilized. There were flowers there as well, and meals served in multiple courses. If you made meals long enough, it was impressive what people could avoid thinking about. Thanergy exploded out of long-gone systems long after it should have; necromancers scooped up great handfuls of spirit guts and spirit magic they should never have been able to touch, and he kept his House in order, kept the questions at bay, by serving better and better flasks of after-dinner cognac. It wasn't a life, but if it had been, it would have been a good one. It stopped being a crusade soon enough, for him, and after the Resurrection that was the one thing he had needed it to stay, forever, but no one needed to talk about that if they were waiting for their digestif.

He'd done hundreds of those dinners, and then thousands of them. A spirit magician was always leaving and always going only to the River, to the destination at the end of all things, when he followed the trails of power back to their source. Everything of worth, it just...disappeared. It made for a hell of a comedown as the end of an evening drew close. As an anchor he'd place himself there at that table, and watch himself receding from the shore of his own body. He would see the reflection of his earlobes, his skull, in the flat glint of the River above, and eventually--as he guessed Mercy would--his first thought was: foolish meat. 

The Saint of Patience, someone would say, and he would come back to himself sick with elation in those first centuries, and then with dread, in the next, like the keen of the silence after a bell had rung. Was this what it would be, always--always returning, never transported? --never truly somewhere else? 

Back in his body, he would hear himself saying something about tradition as though the repetition was something to encourage. John had said immortality but nothing about _this_ , this fatigue of speaking this way, dining this way, with so many generations fed so well for nothing. Of drowning his youth in the River and returning to the sight of his old man's hands, shaking, around the drinks he'd served, that sunny, optimistic heartbeat of a heat. His heirs would sip, fill with sweetness, and cease to be capable of leaving or returning anywhere. Only himself left to serve, and receive, his contempt.

For those first centuries--only himself. 

She shivered in the shower until he took off her robe. She was not good at behaving like a body that did body things. He jerked the head of the shower closer to the ground, adjusting for height, and ran his hand under the stream.

"Do you prefer the water temperature calibrated for comfort, my dear?" She did not react. He screwed the dial to scalding and she turned her chin, closing her eyes. That same shudder of sickness or pleasure racked her shoulders. "Or comfortable self-abasement, still?" 

The bathroom was tiled in a neat ceramic blue, he'd always preferred to feel like something kept in a nice pot, if preserved. She was like nothing someone would store in a nice pot; her entire being had the feeling of unbearable freshness on the verge of total ruin, something that by its nature could not be preserved. For the past night they'd been in John's room, close as the fever to the skin, but she had never been here--in _his_ rooms, his chamber unmarked by the Divinity, everything he'd chosen now touched by her skin and that seemed worse, somehow, than touching him. Her wrongness making the colors look more saturated, the blue bluer, the space more like him as it grew not like her.

For the second time that night, but not in their lives, he was assailed by the sense of anchor her presence had. He sat against the wall and turned the collar of his robes up against the spray. She got as far as lifting her hand, lifting her hair off her neck, marked with--marks, before she got as far as, "For what we did..."

He held up his hand as though to a blow; it was automatic. She reached forward and seized the flat of his palm. He thought stupidly that she would bite him; realized even more stupidly that she had, a few hours ago. It was all so--it was so stupid. He hadn't seen her in more than a century and...

"I should never have thought to say this in my own bathroom," he said, "but unhand me, please."

"If you can't look at this--if you can't acknowledge it--then get out."

He got out. Not to prove the point, but just to leave, to be elsewhere. All those dinners, he never wanted to go, but the sense of the River--the truer, more awful reality--waiting above, like some creature's belly. She trailed him into the room, naked, dripping water in long streams of silver. He stopped in front of the blackened window and she stopped with him. She braced one hand on the glass and left a wet handprint. 

"It's done, there's nothing to acknowledge--my God, Joy. It's done."

"It isn't done. There are years--decades--"

"You're fooling yourself, I fear. You believe if it isn't done--you think if there are still years to mess it up, we didn't really do it, can still undo it. It's like you to place the sin elsewhere."

"It's like you to believe it done before its time!"

"If there are years--what will we do? How will we live?"

He heard himself laughing. He wasn't always good at behaving like a body that did body things either. She set a hand to his neck--not for comfort, he guessed, but for her usual thing, the taking and accelerating of pulses, all her hateful anatomy, how she needed only to touch something to take it apart but that touch--she _needed_ that. He skittered away and as though this motion had decided it for her she bundled his collar into her hand and drew him down, mouthed along his chin. Aim did not feature in the manuever; she couldn't reach higher. He felt both her tongue and her teeth; he thought she didn't know what to do, whether to be gentle or to bite. He drew one hand up the seam of her spine and bore down into the bitter-coin taste. 

When they drew apart, she looked feverish and furious. She was no longer shivering.

He put a hand to her pulse in turn; he'd intended it as mocking but as with so much else it acquired a different meaning when he made contact. He moved his fingers through the wet hair, glyphing over her shoulders. She tilted her chin up, following the opposite of his motion, to help him. He drew his fingers down. 

"She can't be trusted, you know," he'd said to John, only once.

John had sighed and pushed his fingers into his temples, dislodging, Augustine imagined, all kinds of sacred and all-hallowed dandruff. 

"At some point I'm going to have a talk with you about the importance of trust," he'd said, and it was another ten years before Augustine thought of this, while reading, scenting the dandruffy thalergy in the dusty, mouthbreather silence of the Sixth House library, and remembered that he hadn't been contradicted. 

She got outside his sheets, outside his covers. For someone who had founded the Eighth House, its vulgar impositions of chastity, she was shameless in how she prepared her body as though for dissection, or for surgery. He wondered bitterly, brightly, if she would be different with him then how they had been with John. "Look at the sin," she insisted, so he buried his head between her shoulderblades instead, felt the vertebrae of her back with his tongue. She twisted and sought his face, hauled him up for another of the biting-mouthing kisses, the indecision of whether to consume or to soothe--not the indecision, the inability. The rose-gold, angrily flushing skin, the corded tendons in her arms that had blown one or the other dozen planets and probably at least one fellow Lyctor's nonessential appendages to debris in the last half-century: she had never been indecisive; she had only decided both.

This was what answered his question: yes, then. Here she was different. 

"Look at the sin," she said again, and then--a wrecked sound in her chest-- "I loved him. I loved him, and I didn't look at him while we--"

"I know."

"Look at me. Look me in the eye, you cowardly--you--"

"Me," he said, and pushed her shoulders back, his hips following the motion against her own, a pressing, pressing, pressing. An annihilation, a pressure seeking nothing but opposition. She snapped her own hips up in an awful, slow twist of thighs and wet cunt, and made the pressure into something else. He kissed her chastely and she ground up, rutting against his clothed cock, locking her naked legs behind his knees. The smear of wetness at the edge of her mouth, at the tops of her thighs. "Joy--"

"--it's denial," she said, cutting free of his mouth. "How you need me to say things first. To do them. How you can't say my name."

She'd done this, picked up conversations across the threads of centuries. He took her hips in his hands; he thought with sudden fervor that it was only because of this tendency of hers that this had happened. Her unwillingness to forget. Her unwillingness to settle for the slow numbing comfort of meals or sleep or the long slow slide of himself, of them all, into the River.

It was her fault then, what had happened tonight. In the absolution of this thought he kissed her more slowly, honeyed, contained; he hated her, he was grateful. If he moved his fingers--she swiveled her waist, and caught them where she wanted them. He began, as though in some world truly obedient, to work small strokes against her clit. Her legs worked loosely and then snug, seeking his fingers. He'd never thought of himself as a source of heat; that part of him had died, somewhere along the way, was lost now in the River and he had a sense that if he encountered it again he would cross a boundary he would never be able to redraw. But he felt himself as heat that lived and radiated now, on her collarbone, in the slope of her ass cupped in his palm, his hand working her open, feeling the pulse of her, the flaring star at the heart of her. 

His hips were moving on their own now, too insistent to control. He felt himself slipping out of his body, the way pleasure compelled him to do always, as he had done tonight before he found her, and then--she brought him back.

She wrenched free of him, she seized his cock, palming over the head, she got atop him and bore him down then into the bed. The stars streaking across the windows, the blue walls dark like water, her face with the aliveness of her grief glowing like some mineral set alight. The agony and pleasure coming off her in hot, unbearable waves unmistakable; she was nothing but meat, he knew, just a body, the thing he had transcended, the thing they had transcended, but even the River, he thought now, in something like awe, could not take him from here.

He came in her hand, against her stomach, in great pulls of longing and misery and behind it all a terrible, causeless mirth, like their Lyctorhood: a death and death and death and death and then you realized only by the constant sense of dying that you were more gloriously alive than ever. The pleasure rocked him, flattened him cold. For a second he thought she had killed him with her single-hand touch as he had seen her to do to so many over those years, all the years that now trembled and fell away. Their Lyctorhood--then too, she had been there, the only other body in the void.

She would be there now, until the end, and thanks to her there would be an end. He seized her hand and, surging past the sense of self-preservation, brought it to his chest, took into his mouth in some madness the killing touch. "Joy," he said, then: "mercy--"

She knocked her sweating forehead against his own, breathing hard. She spread her fingers on his chest, knowing every crevice of him. Taking him into her hands. The River roared above him, around them, thanergy surging and here it was: death existed, their doom existed, because time had begun to move again. A wait--a sensation from youth--began, and spread through him with a terrible peace. They were somewhere else. 

She'd asked, him, just before, why he was never willing to take them all to the River. She knew he could. She watched him constantly, with her great wild eyes, and in the assessment of her enmity he was always secure in his capabilities. 

It'd been some nameless day in the Seventh House, an invitation from Cytherea. He was carrying a censer from which wafted their ritual scent, the crushed roses, the jade-veined charcoal, and he badly needed to piss. There was a storm somewhere in the belly of the planet’s atmosphere and they received it at their ceremony in long, shuddering sheets of rain.

From the top of the hill he'd seen her; she was either in disguise or had simply stopped caring. Her hair was bundled into a knot and her eyes were red enough that she'd evidently been crying or shooting up or both. When she had looked up it chilled him through his bones. 

"No reason," he'd said. Then he'd thought of how to answer. 

"The River is the source of all power, all necromancy," he said. " _You_ can't feel it, but I can, I'm afraid. If I brought it here--there would be nowhere left to go. It would solve nothing, give us nothing else."

She held her position and his gaze. The incense began to grow bitter in his censer, the smoke kindling, burning his eyes, his throat. 

"A last stand," she said. "It has its own value."

It touched him unexpectedly and he smiled. "Perhaps." He swung the censer, watching the serene citizens, filing past. "No, the day I bring it here--I fear it will be my last."

She turned. Against the rain, she was her orange self that he had seen an innumerable and agonizing number of times but he'd looked, he'd kept looking. Something about the expectant, furiously searching gaze made him reach down into his marrow for something that could be sought, for some sliver of self, or for a thought. An idea.

She reached into him, invasive as light. He had thought then that he was never to let her touch him, if with only a look, she already found whatever she was looking for.

She said, "So you're not ready to live your last." 

the end


End file.
